DESCRIPTION: Three Research Cores are proposed to facilitate interdisciplinary research into hearing and deafness at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. The Research Center comprises 23 senior investigators and 9 junior investigators, all affiliated with the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory (EPL). They include clinicians and basic scientists, with academic ties to graduate programs and departments at Harvard Medical School and MIT. The Research Base covers a wide range of basic and applied research projects from peripheral mechanics to cortical processing, from in vitro systems to human patients, from animal models to neural nets. The three Cores and the major aims of each include 1) an Engineering Core to design, build, program and maintain data-acquisition systems, custom acoustical devices, and stimulus generation systems, to provide a precision machining service to build custom mechanical devices for a wide variety of research applications, and to share these software and hardware advances with the greater scientific community; 2) a Histology-Surgery Core to maintain existing shared facilities, to assist research teams in animal surgery and histological preparation for both light and electron microscopy and to continually enhance the quality of both histological and surgical preparations throughout the center; and 3) an Imaging Core to support digital image-acquisition and analysis, including confocal microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, computer-aided anatomical reconstruction, automation of morphometry, 3-D reconstruction/rendering, analysis of functional imaging data, and to share virtual teaching models with the greater scientific community.